Giving Up on Consciousness as the Ghost in the Machine
Giving Up on Consciousness as the Ghost in the Machine
Consciousness as used here, refers to the private, subjective experience of being aware of our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, actions, memories (psychological contents) including the intimate experience of a unified self with the capacity to generate ...
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The crazy thing to me is that this is the conclusion I came to around 30 years ago, based on evidence that was already present in research available at the time.
For me it was the natural conclusion from coming to accept a no-collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics. Before that, the ghost in the machine seemed to me like maybe it could be hiding somewhere in the spooky apparent randomness of wavefunction collapse, but if the universal wavefunction fully and deterministically describes the evolution in time of all particles everywhere, and there are no terms for "thoughts and feelings and free will" in that equation, then they are epiphenomena.